Anthony G Williams
Greybeard
I am slowly working my way through Alan Garner's work, this time focusing on a set of four separate but linked stories (total page count 170). These are closely observed snapshots of episodes in time, set (like so much of his writing) in the real Cheshire countryside in which the author has always lived.
The first of the stories, The Stone Book, concerns a few days in the lives of a stone mason and his daughter in Victorian times. The second, Granny Reardun, is set a generation later, featuring the grandson of the stone mason at a critical point of his young life when he decides on his future. The Aimer Gate comes next and is set a further generation later, during the First World War, with the great-grandson of the mason. The last is Tom Fobble's Day, set in the Second World War, with the fourth generation of young people making their own toboggans to slide down snow-covered hills and collecting fragments of munitions dropped by the Luftwaffe bombers or from the shells of the AA guns which fired on them.
The Stone Book Quartet contains no magical elements, unlike most of Garner's work, but it is nonetheless an example of magical prose. His writing is lyrical and powerfully evocative, full of local customs and folklore and the rhythms of dialect speech, and I was reminded of Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, the famous memoir of a Cotswold childhood which is high on any British list of favourite books. The stories may feature children, but they probably appeal more to adults. Simply marvellous, and one to be read again and again.
(An extract from my SFF blog: Science Fiction & Fantasy)
The first of the stories, The Stone Book, concerns a few days in the lives of a stone mason and his daughter in Victorian times. The second, Granny Reardun, is set a generation later, featuring the grandson of the stone mason at a critical point of his young life when he decides on his future. The Aimer Gate comes next and is set a further generation later, during the First World War, with the great-grandson of the mason. The last is Tom Fobble's Day, set in the Second World War, with the fourth generation of young people making their own toboggans to slide down snow-covered hills and collecting fragments of munitions dropped by the Luftwaffe bombers or from the shells of the AA guns which fired on them.
The Stone Book Quartet contains no magical elements, unlike most of Garner's work, but it is nonetheless an example of magical prose. His writing is lyrical and powerfully evocative, full of local customs and folklore and the rhythms of dialect speech, and I was reminded of Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, the famous memoir of a Cotswold childhood which is high on any British list of favourite books. The stories may feature children, but they probably appeal more to adults. Simply marvellous, and one to be read again and again.
(An extract from my SFF blog: Science Fiction & Fantasy)
